Danny Lyon brings the civil rights movement struggle back to life in Santa Barbara exhibit

Photographer Danny Lyon’s shot of a police officer arresting Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activist Taylor Washington outside a delicatessen in Atlanta was taken in 1963 or 1964. Washington, according to Lyon, was arrested many times. It is one of many civil rights movement shots that are part of a Lyon exhibit at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art through June 2.

2008 Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Some 50 years after the civil rights movement, a black man occupies the White House as the leader of our nation.

That simple sentence belies much suffering, the kind photographer Danny Lyon chronicled in his lens. In the Lyon exhibit "This World Is Not My Home," which continues through June 2 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, that era springs indelibly back to life.

Lyon sees a link.

"The young people who created the southern civil rights movement in the early 1960s are directly responsible for Barack Obama being our president today," Lyon said in a recent email from his New Mexico ranch. "Change happens slowly, but it happens, sometimes for the better."

His civil rights-era photography is the highlight of some 54 exhibit pictures that offer a wide retrospective swath across 50 years of his career. Lyon didn't just shoot it, he lived it as a pioneer of the so-called photographic New Journalism, immersing himself in his subjects and their lives and often participating.

He rode with a Chicago motorcycle gang, hung out with Texas prison inmates and marched against segregation in the turbulent South. Lyon once famously said that he wanted to "destroy" Life magazine for what he and others saw as its bland, flowery depictions of American life. His alternative was what some called "street photography."

Life magazine, he explained in the interview, was the media then. It was also "extremely" conservative, he added, as was much of the nation in the late 1950s.

"For a young person who knew there was a better way of presenting the real world, and by the civil rights movement had become a political radical, Life was a valid target," Lyon said.

Eventually, his photo books found an audience and "a new way of seeing and presenting reality" emerged in publishing, he added.

The result, noted Karen Sinsheimer, the museum's curator of photography, was hard-hitting shots that are deeply personal.

"Danny Lyon is one of the great documentary photographers of our time," Sinsheimer said during an exhibit walk-through last month, later adding, "His work in the 1960s — there's no one else like him."

Viewers can judge for themselves — and they also have a chance to meet Lyon when he pops into Santa Barbara for a book signing at the museum Thursday night and a chat session about his career the next afternoon.

Sinsheimer called him a "bad boy," meant more as a playful tease than an indictment. And Lyon's still at it into his early 70s, photographing the Occupy movements in Los Angeles and New York.

Lyon looked at what he's done a bit differently, noting, "My parents were immigrants and my mother often told me I was ‘free.' So I acted that way."

A long struggle, not long ago

Lyon grew up in Queens the son of a Russian-Jewish mother, Rebecca, and a German-Jewish father, Ernst, an eye doctor who charged $5 a visit and sometimes saw 60 patients a day, the younger Lyon recalled.

The younger Lyon came of age during the turmoil and tragedy of the 1960s, a decade of change amid several social revolutions. The civil rights era had dawned, and some of Lyon's work in that realm began to appear in 1963, the same year he graduated from the University of Chicago, where he majored in philosophy and ancient history.

In the summer of 1962, Lyon had packed his cameras in an Army bag and hitchhiked south. Within a week, the 20-year-old was in an Albany, Ga., jail with other protesters including Martin Luther King Jr., who was in the next cell.

Lyon became a staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a group instrumental in organizing sit-ins, freedom rides and voter registration drives in the South.

Some of his shots in the Santa Barbara exhibit are dramatic and emotional, including the arrest of SNCC activist Taylor Washington and a photo of a man being dragged away by armed troops, his shirt almost completely torn off his back.

"It's impossible now to imagine how brutal and hard this struggle was," Sinsheimer said. "People were killed. They were hosed down. They were arrested and beaten up. Some of them went to jail 25 times or more."

One exhibit section includes Lyon's photographs in the aftermath of the fatal bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., on Sept. 15, 1963.

A bomb planted in the basement exploded as several hundred worshippers gathered, killing four young girls — Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley — and badly injuring more than 20 people. It was the city's third bombing since the school system was integrated two weeks earlier.

Lyon photographed King, his jail mate from the previous year, looking sweaty and nervous as he's about to speak at a joint funeral for three of the four girls. Another photo shows somber SNCC activists lined up outside the funeral; they were not allowed in.

The exhibit also features a photo of a young Bob Dylan playing music behind an SNCC office in 1963 in Greenwood, Miss., where the Ku Klux Klan had distributed a threatening flier after King visited the town that same year.

"I only saw the KKK once in uniform," Lyon recalled. "They were parading with their faces uncovered, picketing a restaurant in Atlanta. I thought they looked silly. But I doubt they looked silly to a black person. Secret terrorist organizations, like the Klan, were responsible for almost all the violence that occurred, including the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church."

Sinsheimer opined that Lyon's best work lies not in grand protest or bombing shots but rather in his focus on intimate details, such as how a coffin is laid out or the stark depiction of blown-out church windows.

Another example is the shot of side-by-side drinking fountains at a county courthouse in Georgia in 1962. The one for "colored" people is much smaller than the one for whites.

"Does it not just say it all?" Sinsheimer remarked. "It's definitely not ‘separate but equal.'"

His work is a valuable reminder, Sinsheimer said, adding, "It's important to understand how recent this really is. I feel like the civil rights movement is viewed as ancient history by many people."

Champion of the underdog

Other Lyon work in the exhibit includes samples from his days riding with the Chicago Outlaws motorcycle gang and his two years in the Texas prison system, both in the 1960s.

Sinsheimer noted the intimate shots of bikers — and lack of tattoos in those days. Lyon, she observed, is always "in" his shots.

His photos detailed harsh conditions in Texas prisons, prompting Sinsheimer to wonder how he ever got permission to shoot in six prisons. Replied Lyon, "The short answer is I lied. The long answer is I told them they had a nice prison and should let me make a record of it."

Lyon bonded with some inmates, including a convicted rapist. Author and friend Larry McMurtry, in a New York Times article several years ago, noted that to some, Lyon was idealizing criminals, but that to Lyon, "maybe they're good people who never had a chance."

The Times noted Lyon's penchant for shooting the "unseen or unwanted," adding that he's never been able to do that with a journalist's distance. Lyon has called his work advocacy journalism; others say it shows concern for those on society's margins.

His other subjects and projects, some of which are touched on the Santa Barbara exhibit walls, include life in a Latino community near his home in Sandoval County, N.M., prostitutes and other street children in Colombia, and political turmoil in Haiti.

"He liked the underdog; he felt like an underdog," Sinsheimer observed. "He was always in search of the people who are considered outsiders."

Still occupied

Compared with his 1960s heyday, his later work, Sinsheimer opined, "doesn't seem to have that same fire in the belly."

But his passion for causes hasn't died, as his thoughts on covering the Occupy movement show.

"Occupy blazed like a comet across an American sky of apathy and greed," Lyon said. "It's been extremely influential. In France, major reform is based on Occupy. The entire national discussion about tax and wealth was advanced by these kids, and homeless, who in L.A. and Oakland suffered at the hands of the police. Our nation is being destroyed by greed. It's sad to see, and easy to admire those that, however hopeless it might seem, fight back."

Lyon's work is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Library of Congress, among others. He has received two Guggenheim fellowships, one for photography and one for filmmaking, as well as 10 National Endowment for the Arts awards. His work has been compared to famed Depression-era photographers Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans.

Lyon called that praise "very flattering" but said he was not alone. Working with the SNCC allowed him to witness close hand "one of the most successful grass-roots movements in American history."

"If what I did after SNCC is respected," he continued, "it is because of the people who spoke through my pictures and my books. They are myriad, and at the time, were just not on the radar screen of comfortable America, which included most of the media."

"He's still a bad boy," she said. "You can't keep him down or under control. He's still restless, still in search of the truth."

Lyon didn't sound like someone too impressed with his own legend.

Asked to reflect on his career, Lyon replied in part, "The things I remember most are my dog Sam, and a rainbow trout I caught last week in the ditch."

DANNY LYON

Photographer Danny Lyon will sign copies of his photo books from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St., Santa Barbara. Those books include "Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement," "Knave of Hearts" and his new one, "Deep Sea Diver," all of which can be purchased in the museum store. The event is free.

Lyon also will chat about his career with UC Santa Cruz art history professor Kim Bell from 2:30-3:30 p.m. April 5 in the museum's Mary Craig Auditorium. Tickets are $10 for adults and $6 for seniors. Museum members get in free. Tickets are available at the visitor's services desk, or online at http://tickets.sbma.net.

Lyon's exhibit "This World Is Not My Home," featuring images from the civil rights movement, prisons, motorcycle gang culture and more, continues through June 2 at the museum, which recently acquired a 31-print portfolio of Lyon's civil rights era work for its collection.

Museum hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. Admission is $10 general; $6 for seniors 65 and older and youths 6 -17. Kids younger than 6, museum members and active military and their families get in free.